Brian's Lost Weekend

I spent nearly every minute of every waking hour in the basement computer room working on configuring my new Novell Linux 10 box this weekend.

For the most part, it's been fun. There were some initial setbacks related to the hardware but the bulk of the transition was smooth. The new system allocated a number of user ID and group ID values which I had used on the older Red Hat Linux so some user renumbering and ownership changes were required in the transition of files. Paths to some utilities have changed too, requiring some adjustments to my cron scripts (my old box didn't have a /usr/share tree of any consequence). Hell, keeping the old machine from crashing long enough to get a good backup was a challenge in itself.

The biggest pain was shutting down the e-mail system for the duration to ensure that Sendmail, Majordomo & friends were happy with the new Linux: the only way to test the authenticated SMTP was to open the floodgates which risked losing incoming e-mail if all wasn't configured correctly. In the end, it was a severe pain in the ass getting the permissions of the mailboxes, log files, configuration files and binaries to all play nice together but it is done.

Alas, the virtual hosting on the Apache2 web server wasn't quite so cooperative. It liked my www.office-assist.com domain nicely enough, but it wouldn't display anything --or generate errors-- for www.kentforrester.com or www.tiesoptional.org. The domain names were resolving correctly, but Apache2 wouldn't display them. At the end of the night, I gave up and flipped back to the older Apache version & config files which worked so well on the older Red Hat Linux for many years, but they're not working correctly either, which only compounds the mystery. At least this has no significant impact so I have some time to think this through.

I've ordered a replacement motherboard for the older crashing machine for $50. I figure I'll rebuild that machine and install Solaris 10 just for fun.

Brian's Lost Weekend

I spent nearly every minute of every waking hour in the basement computer room working on configuring my new Novell Linux 10 box this weekend.

For the most part, it's been fun. There were some initial setbacks related to the hardware but the bulk of the transition was smooth. The new system allocated a number of user ID and group ID values which I had used on the older Red Hat Linux so some user renumbering and ownership changes were required in the transition of files. Paths to some utilities have changed too, requiring some adjustments to my cron scripts (my old box didn't have a /usr/share tree of any consequence). Hell, keeping the old machine from crashing long enough to get a good backup was a challenge in itself.

The biggest pain was shutting down the e-mail system for the duration to ensure that Sendmail, Majordomo & friends were happy with the new Linux: the only way to test the authenticated SMTP was to open the floodgates which risked losing incoming e-mail if all wasn't configured correctly. In the end, it was a severe pain in the ass getting the permissions of the mailboxes, log files, configuration files and binaries to all play nice together but it is done.

Alas, the virtual hosting on the Apache2 web server wasn't quite so cooperative. It liked my www.office-assist.com domain nicely enough, but it wouldn't display anything --or generate errors-- for www.kentforrester.com or www.tiesoptional.org. The domain names were resolving correctly, but Apache2 wouldn't display them. At the end of the night, I gave up and flipped back to the older Apache version & config files which worked so well on the older Red Hat Linux for many years, but they're not working correctly either, which only compounds the mystery. At least this has no significant impact so I have some time to think this through.

I've ordered a replacement motherboard for the older crashing machine for $50. I figure I'll rebuild that machine and install Solaris 10 just for fun.

Happy birthday, markgarciachris!

Congrats on another year of successfully hiding the bodies of your former colleagues! :-)

Happy birthday, markgarciachris!

Congrats on another year of successfully hiding the bodies of your former colleagues! :-)